Poetry: First Lines
- Question: “When I am dead, my dearest, / Sing no sad songs for me;”
- Answer: The poem, known by its first line, is by Christina Rossetti.
- Question: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master”
- Answer: It’s the start of Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle “One Art.”
- Question: “Booth led boldly with his big bass drum— / (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)”
- Answer: That boisterous opening belongs to Vachel Lindsay’s “General William Booth Enters into Heaven.”
- Question: “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, / I all alone beweep my outcast state,”
- Answer: Those immortal words start William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29.”
- Question: “Coming by evening through the wintry city / We said that art is out of love with life.”
- Answer: The lines are those of Adrienne Rich in “At a Bach Concert.”
- Question: “Exultation is the going / Of an inland soul to sea,—”
- Answer: Emily Dickinson penned that untitled poem.
- Question: “I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin,…”
- Answer: The line begins Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover.”
- Question: “I was so sick last night I / Didn’t hardly know my mind.”
- Answer: Those words open the poem “Morning After” by Langston Hughes.
- Question: “You can get there from here, though / there’s no going home.”
- Answer: The lines are from “Theories of Time and Space” by Natasha Trethewey.
- Question: “Go and catch a falling star, / Get with child a mandrake root,”
- Answer: Those lines open the glorious poem “Song” by John Donne.
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Amherst College Archives & Special Collections (Public Domain)
Amherst College Archives & Special Collections (Public Domain)